1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a system that calculates prices for, and summarizes events in real time and, more particularly, to pricing events, including system created events, at an optimum time before a billing process is performed.
2. Description of the Related Art
The telecommunications industry has traditionally performed the pricing process during the billing process to ensure all charges appearing on a bill are priced correctly. Another process traditionally performed during the billing process is the process of creating system-created events, such as recurring charges. The time and expense (i.e., processing power) required to perform these processes is increasing because the telecommunications industry continues to expand, offering more complicated services, more combinations of services, and more pricing models, in addition to simply generating a growing number of events to be created, priced and billed. This results in a shrinking time window for the billing process to be completed.
Also, as competition increases in the telecommunications industry, customers (residential and business, alike) are demanding immediate access to, more accurate, and up-to-date information on charges that will appear on their next bill. With widely used tools such as the Internet, self-customer care, and on-line banking, these types of customer demands (on-demand requests) are likely to increase.
Traditional telecommunications billing systems are based on the approach that charges are only calculated for services that have been rendered, with the exception of recurring charges, which are typically billed in advance. This approach results in performing the pricing process at the latest possible moment, which is during the billing process.
What is needed is a system where system-created events are created independent of the billing process and charges for events are calculated real-time such that pricing is performed at the earliest reasonable and practical time. This offers both the telecommunications company and the customers of the telecommunications company the most immediate and accurate access to unbilled charges possible, as well as improves the billing process by reducing the computational demands of the billing process.